The Secret Lives in "Silver Sparrow"

I've gotten very far behind in posting the books I've been reading, so this week I'll be doing some marathan blogging to try to catch up a bit.

The Fab 5 Book Club met, oh, some time ago, to talk about Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones. But first we ate some great Mexican food, from a restaurant that was closed by the health department shortly thereafter. We’re not sure whether we should be sad or grateful that we escaped with our lives.

We also talked a bit about pet-sitting. One upcoming vacation prompted the need for a rat-sitter. Then Nancy mentioned that she once did some cat-sitting for a friend, a friend who left a sticky note on every conceivable surface with instructions about the cat, the food, the way the toilet flushed, etc. Cat people may respond here in their own defense, but it seems there is something about anyone who owns multiple cats that puts them under the shadow of suspicion.

But about the book. Dana and Chaurisse are sisters, but only one of them knows it. They share a father, James Witherspoon, and Dana has spent her life as the product of his secret marriage. Chaurisse, on the other hand, is the daughter of his public wife and has lived a pampered, sheltered life. The book is written from Dana’s perspective in the first half, and the second half comes from Chaurisse.

All of us were caught by the story, wanting to know what happened. We spent some time wondering what it would be like to find out that your father has a whole different family. And what it would be like to grow up knowing that. Children look to their parents for their identity—to find out how much they are loved, to try to figure out where they fit in the list of parental priorities. Daughters look to their fathers for the male perspective on themselves, and they watch their parents’ interactions to find out what marriage might look like for themselves.

To grow up as part of a secret family, your needs always second to that of the public family, means that you are not first priority. But on the other hand, growing up in a secure family with no knowledge of the other family, makes your life and the love you’ve experienced a fraud. It’s a fascinating puzzle to consider.

Identity is a huge issue for everyone involved—a man who doesn’t want to work for anyone else, his brother who looks white but is not, and two women who may or may not be beloved wives. The book points out how much of our identity is shaped by our relationship to others and how we are perceived.

On top of that, Jones sets the story in 1980s Atlanta, which had us all think back on jelly shoes and Add-a-Bead necklaces. Okay, I’m the only one who knew about Add-a-Beads. Must have been a southern thing. There were some cracks in the 80s description—I can’t think of anyone who was fashionably sporting a tube top in the mid-80s—but still kind of fun.

The biggest downfall for us is that none of us could quite understand how the character of James Witherspoon warranted all this female attention in the first place. While it is still missing something to make it great, it is an interesting, well-written story.

Looking forward to "That Old Cape Magic"

As we planned our East coast camping trip this summer, I looked up fiction that had something to do with Maine or Cape Cod. One title popped up under both subjects, That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo. He’s the author of the Pulitzer-winning novel Empire Falls, which is a book I really enjoyed, for lack of a better word. Empire Falls is not a happy book; it’s actually quite depressing. But I absolutely loved Miles, the main character, and I felt like I could breathe the air of the dying mill town that he lived in.

That Old Cape Magic is about a couple married for 30 years; Griffin is still in love with Joy. They go back to Cape Cod for a wedding, with the plan to revisit the place they stayed on their honeymoon, the place where they mapped out their future together. Cape Cod is also where he vacationed for many years as a child. The familiar setting stirs memories of his summers there and, particularly, the atrocious parenting (and education about marriage) he received from the cynical academics who were his father and mother. He thought he'd left all that behind, but it seems that his parents have left a larger mark on him that he believed.

This novel is about Griffin and the parenting he received, but mostly it is about marriage. Russo is a master of detail, especially the contours of a relationship. He plays out the daily irritations that grow into bigger things, and he explores the ways that you can know someone so well—every facial expression, every freckle or scar—but not every shadow of the heart (if you need more explanation just listen to “The Stranger” by Billy Joel). He names the perversity that we are all susceptible to--doing exactly the thing that irritates or hurts the one we love most, even as we know we are doing it.

As in Empire Falls, there is much genuine brokenness in this book. And I can't say it's particularly friendly to religion in general. But there is something weirdly satisfying about having familiar, human disappointments and temptations named and described so well, like reading your old diary.

And since he’s very rooted in the places he writes about, his descriptions of the Maine coast and particularly Cape Cod make me eager to get going—without the bad parenting, of course.

Friday Noon Movie Club: "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"

As I’m about to watch my eldest make the 8^th grade graduation march into high school, I’m feeling my age. What better to make me feel young again than to watch a group of more mature folks taking a big life adventure? I felt younger the minute I walked in the theater, where I was about 20 years younger than any of the other 30 people there.

Then the previews began, which is always sort of a crapshoot—I’m never sure what I will be subjected to in previews. There were four previews before The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and I want to see all of them. The Words, in which an author’s fiction is somehow intruding on reality, Hyde Park on the Hudson, which features Bill Murray as FDR and Laura Linney as something mysteriously between a head maid and a mistress, Beasts of the Southern Wild (okay, this one I’m a little uncertain about) some sort of sci-fi apocalyptic story about a young child in Louisiana deltas, seems to involve a Katrina-style hurricane and some aurochs, an ancient ox-type creature which (I happen to know from my Bible editing gigs) are translated in the King James Bible as unicorns. And Ruby Sparks, which looks like the plot of the aforementioned The Words combined with the quirkier style of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—a young author creates a female character who comes to life.

What did all this teach me? It seems that I am squarely in the demographic of a movie aimed at the AARP audience (no offense to the many of my friends who are already there!). Look what a few good “Masterpiece Theater” miniseries will do to you. My advice: stay away from PBS. It ages you. Watch Step Up 17 instead, or Paranormal Activity 35, because if you watch too much Downton Abbey or Bleak House, you are likely to end up like me. Previews aimed at senior citizens are hitting my sweet spot.

Back to the movie. As I expected, there are lots of predictable things about the story. But that’s not what I was there for. I was there for the actors.

The premise is that the Marigold Hotel is advertised as a newly renovated luxury hotel for seniors citizens, but the renovations have not yet been completed. Most of the new arrivals take this remarkably well after the first moments of disbelief. In my own experience, people expecting luxury are not easily mollified when introduced to something lesser. But this is fantasy.

Judi Dench is Evelyn, a luminous as a widow who is looking to make a new life for herself. Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton are Douglas and Jean Ainslie, a long-married couple who can’t afford the kind of retirement they want in England. Tom Wilkinson is Graham, a gay man who grew up in India and spent the rest of his life in England wondering about the people he left behind. Madge (Celia Imrie) is on the hunt for her next, preferably rich, husband. Ronald Pickup plays Norman, a lecherous man who is looking to ease his loneliness, if only for one night. And Maggie Smith plays, Muriel, a bitter and racist woman who needs a hip replacement and can get it more quickly and easily in India. That’s your ensemble cast, an aging version of New Year’s Eve, or Valentine’s Day, or yes, even Love Actually.

Tom Wilkinson is wonderful in his role. Loved him. His character is the best at letting us see India as a place of its own, with pros and cons, without all the drama of the new traveler. Bill Nighy’s Douglas is loveable, if not unique, as a husband who has disappointed his wife but is finding new energy from the change of setting. Penelope Wilton (Matthew Crawley’s mother on Downton), on the other hand, has a thankless role as his resentful and sanitation-obsessed wife who can’t adjust to their new life. It doesn’t matter how well she acts it, the part has nothing to empathize with. Maggie Smith fares better, though I would have liked to see more of her character’s development. Madge and Norman are mostly there for comic relief and for rounding out the cast, but they are not terribly likeable either. Thankfully they are also forgettable.

For a travel addict such as myself, there are parts of this movie that function as something like a drug fix. I am in the early stages of planning my India itinerary as I type, though I wish that the movie showed us more. The fantasy aspect of the film shows through, though, in the quick reference to extra trips to the bathroom after another exotic meal. Much as I want to see all of the world, two rounds with the vicious amoeba were enough to convince me that caution with food is not so overrated, and germophobia is the one way I could relate to the character of Jean Ainslie.

Dev Patel, who played the young man in Slumdog Millionaire, plays the manager of the hotel. Sometimes the gestures and exasperation are just more caricature; other times he is allowed to play the character as a real human being struggling to overcome his life’s obstacles.

I recently heard a podcast that talked about how older people are portrayed in the media. Elderly characters are usually a farce, a ridiculous caricature. Some of these characters rise above that, nicely so. Some do not. I will say, though, that the people who shared the theater with me that day seemed to really like the movie. As the credits rolled, one woman said “Finally, something for us.”

This movie is basically fluff, albeit fluff full of my favorite British actors. There is a little too much sadness to make it complete fluff, and a little too much slapstick to make it truly resonate. While I enjoyed the time in the theater, I left wishing for something more satisfying, and frankly, more hopeful for my future.  

An Enormous Book of Enormous Consequence

The Neland Women’s Book Club met tonight (yes, they’ve met more often than I have recorded, because I’ve been unable to attend for a couple of months now). We talked about The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. This book is about the Great Migration, the massive movement of African Americans from the southern states to the north in the 20^th century. I’ll say right now that I did not finish the book, so some of this is inferred information from the group. Ladies, if I have something wrong, please correct me in the comments!

Our leader of the month, Sue, helped us wade through the issues and information presented by the book. She mentioned that Wilkerson is a journalist, the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1994. She was interested in the subject of the migration because of her own parents’ migration, and she spent 15 years researching and interviewing 1200 people for this project.

Between World War I and the 1970s about 6 million African Americans migrated north. That’s in comparison, for example, to the 300,000 “Okies” who famously left the Oklahoma area for the west coast during the Dust Bowl. Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and an extremely restrictive caste system led the people of the Great Migration to leave all they knew, in mostly rural areas, to have more freedoms and opportunities. Unfortunately, they tended to find it difficult to gain employment, restricted housing options and cities infected with crime.

The recently migrated were willing to work hard to make a life for themselves, but their children found it frustrating to live with a lack of prospects, and they were living in community with African-Americans who had already been living in the north and who were already frustrated.

Wilkerson uses a form called narrative nonfiction to follow three people in particular: Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster and George Starling. Sue noted that George was from the same area in Florida where Trayvon Martin lost his life. Wilkerson says she used three books as her models: The Grapes of Wrath, Avalon, and The Joy Luck Club.

I personally was utterly floored to find out that immediately after emancipation, former slaves had many rights, and that those were slowly taken away. I had always been under the impression that Jim Crow laws were pretty much in force from Day 1 after emancipation. And so the former slaves, who had at least a forced and artificial relationship with the white community, had children and grandchildren who had basically zero relationship with the white community. The white community over the years built up a sort of hysteria, basically psychotically afraid of giving black neighbors any power or rights.

Sue said that it is amazing to realize that all of this happened basically in her lifetime, and she was so unaware. Alice said it is one of the saddest books she’s ever read, but she hastened to add that it was excellent. Both of them remembered a time long ago in their Chicago-area neighborhood when the white church community there felt threatened by the arrival of African Americans.

The only criticism that we heard was that the book was somewhat repetitive. That criticism was, fittingly enough, repeated by several people. However, there was some feeling that with all the information presented, some repetition helps the reader retain the important points.

We talked some about how this informs our perspective on our own town of Grand Rapids. Certainly people migrated to GR, and GR suffered white flight. We questioned the role of Christian schools in making our city more segregated, since in the early days the Christian schools served a white community. We wonder how much racism prevails even now, when we don’t even realize it.

A line from the book about Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, who was a educated as a medical doctor and ran into obstacles everywhere he went because of his skin color: “Still it made no sense to Pershing that one set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn’t see the bars.” What bars are right in front of us that we never notice? And how does that affect us in ways that we don’t realize?

In a speech, Wilkerson said this: “I believe that the next migration has to be for us as individuals, as human beings, to recognize that we have so much more in common than we are led to believe. And to recognize that when everyone does better, everyone does better."

Friday Noon Movie Club: "Bully"

Last Friday I gave the Friday Noon Movie Club the opportunity to vote on what movie I would see. They sent me to see Bully, and a few of them even kindly came with me. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the documentary. I’ve been feeling like bullying was the new trendy topic, something that comes up because parents always need something to worry about.

I was a tomboy in elementary school, playing tackle football and getting into the occasional fight. Fighting is an inept description of what I was up to—I’d get in one good punch and run, fast. I don’t think my fighting qualified me as a bully, since I tended to be more vigilante than bully. (Think along the lines of the 80s movie My Bodyguard.) I was very self-righteous, very big and tall, and I had a tendency to jump in when necessary until I was in 5^th or 6^th grade. For example, when my scrawny 2^nd grade boyfriend got teased by the bigger boys, I could take them. I probably stepped over the line a bit more in the fight I had with the neighbor girl when I was 5 or 6. I distinctly remember hitting her over the head with a metal shovel and yelling “Get off my property!”

It only took a few minutes of Bully to tell me that it’s about more than just your average playground standoff.

The filmmakers interviewed several children, mostly middle school age, who have been victims of bullying, as well as their parents. They also followed a young man named Alex, who lives in Sioux City, Iowa. They showed him at home, on the school bus and at school. Kids tormented him with terrible words and physical abuse. I had some idea of what it was going to be like, but I was unprepared for the viciousness of the verbal attacks. Some victims are encouraged to stand up for themselves, but that’s just not an option for everyone.

I happen to love and live with two middle-schoolers of my own at the moment. Middle school can be a place where the very best in humankind is displayed—kids are starting to think more critically and they are not jaded, so their idealism and faith development can be beautiful to see. It is also a place that gives Calvinists some powerful evidence for total depravity. The instinct in some to gain, use and abuse power is strong, as is the instinct to stay silent and safe in others.

Parents, teachers and other youth leaders would benefit from Bully. Parents will be particularly affected by the family members who show pictures and videos of the victims as babies and toddlers, talking about them with the same fierce bond of love any parent feels. That aspect of it might be somewhat lost on younger viewers, but their grief would not be.

I’m not sure I’d take just any middle-school student to see it, because the movie includes interviews with the families of several victims who have taken their own lives. While that’s not depicted as a good solution, it might still plant the seed in the mind of a child who is truly struggling—after all, for whatever other consequences there are to suicide, those victims are not being bullied anymore.

For a child who might have a tendency to bully, however, Bully might help them empathize with the victims. With some preparation and some debriefing, parents could use this as a tool to open up a discussion the topic.

At Friday’s screening, there were the four of us, plus a class of high school students who seemed to be paying close attention. Unfortunately for them, they must not have had time for the entire movie, so with about half an hour left, the teachers silently stood up, made a hand motion in the air, and they all filed quietly out. I wish they had been able to see the last portion, which made it clear that the best way to fight bullying is to stand together against it.

There is some feeling of hope at the end as victims and the families of victims gather and speak out against bullying, encouraging young people to stand up for the victims. Though the moviemakers might not recognize it, the film cries out for the real answer: we all need to recognize the image of God in every person.

Friday Noon Movie Club: "A Separation"

This past Friday I was joined by two Friday Movie friends, and we had the entire theater to ourselves. It must be what Siskel and Ebert used to feel like, sitting in that screening room. Except without all the power. And I bet their daughters didn’t call them in the middle of the movie to beg a ride home so they wouldn’t have to get on the bus. Where was I? Oh, the movie.

A Separation is an Iranian film about a problem very familiar to the Western world—a marriage that is being pulled apart by the desire to do what is best for both a child and an ailing parent. No simple thing.

Nader and Simin are a married couple who, from all appearances, respect and love each other. They have been bringing up their daughter, Termeh, to be an independent, intelligent young woman. They’ve also been making plans to leave Iran for another, more open country for their daughter.

The trouble is, Nader’s father has Alzheimer’s. He’s past the point of recognizing his son, though he still calls his daughter-in-law by name. Nader cannot bear to leave him in the care of someone else. Simin leaves, going to stay with her mother with the expressed intention of leaving the country before the visa expires. Termeh is caught in between them, doing what she can to keep her parents together.

In the midst of their frustrations, Nader hires a woman to help care for his father while he is gone for the day. This woman finds the job very difficult for several reasons. She suffers fear of breaking religious law by cleaning the father when he soils himself. She is pregnant, she has a young daughter who comes to work with her, and she is married to an unemployed, hot-tempered man who does not know about her job. A disagreement between employer and the employee leads to a legal battle.

The film gives insight into daily life in Iran, at least for the moderately well-to-do. It gives a glimpse of the criminal justice system there, as well as the precarious nature of any life, subject to forces that we cannot control.

The separation of the title has many implications. The separation of the married couple. Separation between parents and children, between upper and lower class, between those with power and those without. The separations are symbolized by constantly opening and closing doors. Whenever anyone decides to speak the truth to another, they put someone else out of the room before they speak, especially the young girls. The true separations come when anyone chooses to lie to protect themselves, to make themselves look better. Every time an untruth comes out of someone’s mouth, a new separation is born.

This is a wrenching film, but an unflinching look at the struggle between self-protection in the name of safety and self-sacrifice in the name of integrity. The characters are well-rounded and true, as are the performances. Nader’s love and honor of his afflicted father is heartbreaking and beautiful. And on top of it all, you get to see into the daily life of a family in Iran, a world we rarely get to see.

New "Birds" of America

Birds of a Lesser Paradise, a collection of short stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman, explores the relationship of people to animals, of humanity to nature. Those timely themes are the ribbon tying together a gift of well-crafter stories that deliver like Alice Munro without most of Munro’s creepiness.

In a meeting last week I witnessed the silent tension between two women who were silently agreeing to disagree. One told us how she decided with her husband that they would set a limit, $500, on the amount of money they would spend to save their dog, before they even got one. She said that as long as there are people starving in the world, they can’t throw unlimited funds at a pet. Another woman, who loves her dogs like children and has gone through training for her dog to be used in therapy, smiled and stayed quiet.

I understand both of these perspectives. I’m someone who lived happily without a dog for quite a few years and now has one who requires steroids to keep from getting skin infections that require antibiotics, steroids that lead to tooth decay and makes teeth cleanings a necessity. She sighs and turns to another new position as she lies against me, keeping my thigh warm, even as I type.

The complicated relationship between people and animals in Bergman's book moves between that of owner and pet, prey and predator, caregiver and the needy. The “civilized” world and nature also have a complex relationship—we abuse and protect the environment, sometimes at the very same time. Even the threat of environmental disaster is held up against the personal tragedies and triumphs of individuals.

One of Bergman’s stories involves a woman whose boyfriend (named Malachi, no less) runs an environmentalist group. This group requires a pledge of “no breeding” from its members, with the goal that nature take over and humanity die out. The woman finds out that she has somehow become pregnant, and she must re-evaluate what she believes.

Characters with deep respect for their environments seem to be losing out to those environments. Others must make a choice between the animals and the people that they love. Characters revisit their ethics and creeds when circumstances change and their basic beliefs come into question.

Another story that really stuck with me is that of a woman who rescues needy animals. Her partner cannot tolerate it, and he leaves until she can come to a decision. She calls herself “the shepherd of a strange flock," which left me with a lovely vision of the damaged and vulnerable flock that I am part of on this earth, waiting on my shepherd. While this book seems for the most part consciously unreligious, in fact featuring a character or two who are decidedly against Christianity, the spiritual nature and the complexity of earthkeeping comes through loud and clear.

Great writing and interesting characters led me to pick this up again and again, even though short stories usually leave me feeling sort of short-changed. I often feel like I have just commited to a character, only to find out that particular story is finished. In this book, I was eager to find out who else I would be introduced to, where they lived, and what animals “peopled” their lives. This time around I wasn’t discouraged by the abrupt nature of the short story.

Don’t read this if you are looking for heartwarming dog or cat stories. The animals in the book are full and well-rounded, not anthropomorphized, as are the ties that bind them to the humans. The author exhibits both a love for the natural world and a hope in the nature of humanity.